Tuesday, August 31, 2010

I’ve seen this blog carnival around and often cracked up at the posts. I’ve wanted to link up, Kayleigh is always saying hysterical things, but I am forgetful and forget most everything she says before I think to write it down. But I’ve remembered something, finally. So here I am writing it down.

In case you’ve never been to my blog before, let me give you a couple of Kayleigh quotes that will clue you into her personality.

Things you will often hear here saying to her older sister:

“Scoop ova Tenzie! (That’s K-speak for scoot and Mackenzie.) You is too close to my mommy!”

“Stinkeryella”~(Please pronounce those l’s like y’s. Thank you. ) I don’t even know what to say about this one. She came up with this herself. She’s never even seen Cinderella.

What she says after getting in trouble.

“You my best fwiendt! I yuve you much!”

So know you know that she’s bossy, tempermental, and clever.

And her most recent big production.

We’re at the closing night of Vacation Bible School. Our pastor is giving a little speech. For whatever reason, his speech starts off with a story of a kid jumping into a river near his house when an alligator attacks him.

Kayleigh was apparently listening because she shouts, at the top of her lungs, “Oh my gosh!!!! That is soooo bad!” Hands on her cheeks, Home Alone style.

Everyone heard her. Even though we were in the back. Even though there were tons of kids all giggling and restless. She was that loud. Pastor commented, “Yes Kayleigh that was bad.”

He was probably thinking how sweet she was to be concerned and impressed that she was actually listening to him at all.

At least until she started making alligator motions with her hands and shouting, “Snap! Snap! Snap!”

I doubt anyone who was there could tell you what the point of Pastor’s story was that night.

I should’ve never taught her 5 Little Monkeys Sitting in a Tree.

Click to Tiny Tot Button at the top of the page to hear more Tiny Talk.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

There was not a lot of tot schooling happening here this week. The tot was not the least bit interested in anything except avoiding naps and walking around in dress up shoes.

Our letter this week was D. D was supposed to be for dinosaur, Dora, or dragon but in really it was for disappointing. LOL Needless to say, since we barely touched anything, we’ll be continuing with D next week too.

Here’s what we did do. We read about David and Goliath and Daniel in the lion’s den in our various tot friendly Bibles.

We were going to use these Dinosaur clip cards with our mini-clothespins except the mini-clothespins were too difficult. She really has terrible time squeezing anything with her fingers. Whether it’s tongs, clothespins of varying sizes, she struggles.

So I took away cards and clipped the pins to a container and tried to show her how to pinch them to open them. She did not want to hear it. This child does not take direction well at all. She just pulled them off and wouldn’t even attempt to pinch them.

The biggest hit of the week was just playing with toy dinosaurs. She hadn’t seen these before and she used them everyday. Mackenzie enjoyed them too. I also gave them some played so they could make dinosaur tracks.

I also gave her some free time with play dough in the hopes of building up those little fingers. However, as I expected, her interest in that didn’t last more than 5 minutes. She’s never been big on play dough. Well unless dinosaurs are involved. Then she loves it. LOL

She kept trying to steal Mackenzie’s Mad Libs so I pulled out this Wacky Animals Mad Art book that I had picked up a while back. While she didn’t do it as intended, she did enjoy writing in it. At least until she started writing on the floor and her clothes because she insisted on laying down with it. Then I took it away.

Our non-pictured activities included a trip to Water Country USA, watching Dinosaur Train, and getting in lots of trouble for climbing out of her bed at nap time and playing with toys.

Oh and she has a new favorite book, Touch the Art: Make Van Gogh's Bed. It’s a board book featuring art from all the greats with a touch and feel element for the tots. She just loves it!

Saturday, August 28, 2010

The theme for this week’s L.E.N.S. Photo Challenge is listen. I was having a hard time thinking of what I wanted to do for this one. I thought about maybe using one of my MANY photos of my toddler screaming. I do listen to that a lot. LOL

However, we did some shopping today and that inspired me to go in a different direction. So here’s my entry.

My budding piano player was a tad disappointed that you couldn’t see that it was her playing our new digital piano. So I’m posting this picture too, as proof that it is, indeed, Mackenzie playing. LOL It’s not my entry though.

Hopefully, with a few lessons under her built, this will become something that we enjoy listening to frequently. For now we might need to get some head phones for that thing. LOL

Friday, August 27, 2010

I am happy to report that our third week of school was another success. We accomplished everything I planned, including art, and spent a day at Water Country USA with friends.

Math

Mackenzie breezed through dividing by tens this week. It’s been good to see that she’s been remembering all of her multiplication facts from last year too.

Social Studies

We started reading William Wilberforce this week. One might wonder why we are reading about a British Prime Minister while studying American history. I’m thinking that it’s probably because Wilberforce was huge part of ending the slave trade over in England. I’m sure that it impacted the goings-on over here. And it’s a great read on how God can use one man to do great things.

Mackenzie finished By the Great Horn Spoon and loved it so much that she wanted to write a little report on it. Who does that? LOL

Of course it should be known that book reports here are not what they were when I was in school. No long, hand-numbing recount of the entire book. We use How to Report on Books which is comprised of a lot of fun and creative forms to make report writing less boring and more interesting.

She never was able to decide what she liked best about it. “The touching ending” or “it made me laugh.”

She has since started Sing Down the Moon. It must be pretty good because today while she was reading it she was gasping and muttering things like “I can’t believe it.” It’s about a Navajo girl and the many things she has to overcome in her life.

Moccasin Trail continues to be our read aloud. It also continues to be fabulous.

Science

In our Zoology 1 studies we focused on what makes a bird a bird. We talked about the parts of a bird and ways to indentify them using a field guide.

Here is Mackenzie observing the different size ranges that are used to identify birds.

Language Arts

In First Language Lessons she started working on conjugating verbs and memorizing her first poem of the year, Afternoon on a Hill by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It always amazes me how quickly she memorizes these things. One day and she had it down cold.

She admired the FLL poem printables over at Homeschool Creations. Mackenzie is on level 4 so she wanted us to make some for level 4. So we did. They came out alright considering we made them. LOL If you happen to be using FLL level 4, feel free to download them. We downloaded the first three levels from Homeschool Creations and now have a nice book of all the poems she’s learned over the years.

Writing With Ease is still going well. We read, we narrate, we dictate, etc. Never much to report there. LOL I was thinking how it was too bad that we didn’t discover this until 2nd grade. If we had, the reading selections would have complimented our history studies perfectly last year. LOL

Extras

We started our artist study on Mary Cassatt this week. We read a brief article about her life and Mackenzie made a notebook page for her Artist/Composer notebook. My plan is to study to pieces of artwork per week. One will be an oral picture study and the other will involve a notebook page on the work. We’ll end each artist with an art project pertaining to their work.

Later in the week she made another where she had to devote one section to only straight lines and bent angles and the other section to only curved lines.

And because I know you care, lol, here’s our newly designated art display. It used to have a bulletin board with our “daily schedule” in there. The “daily" schedule” that we ignored on a daily basis. I got tired of it mocking me so I removed it and decided to make better use of the space. LOL

Oh and for home ec, Mackenzie made brownies the “old fashioned way.” Without a box. They were for Daddy’s birthday.

And that was our week. Soccer starts tomorrow so I’ll be able to report about PE. Woot!

Sunday, August 22, 2010

This week's L.E.N.S. Challenge was sunlight. I had trouble choosing so I narrowed it down to two. =o)

This is taken in the Phillipine Sea just before sunset. We were stranded in the boat that we had just boat and I was bored. (And I do mean literally just bought. We were taking the boat from the seller to our marina. But that's another story. LOL)

This is also of the Phillipine Sea, right at sunset, from land. I love the silouette of the plants. I never noticed the four spider silouettes until after the fact. Good thing, cuz I'd have probably freaked. It could've been worse, I guess, this was in Guam so it very well could've been a silouette of a brown tree snake. Ack!

It was another interesting week. We lost a couple of days to errands involving Big Sis' extra curriculars but we still managed to do quite a bit. When she was in the right frame of mind. More often then not, she was just in a mood. Shocking, I know. LOL

But what I can't wait to show you is what she did at the end of our week. I'm going to wait though. Til the end. It's worth the wait though.

One of the first things that we did was finish our "B is for Bumblebee" page for our ABC book we're making. I forgot to take a picture of the completed project, but you get the idea. She was very excited to use "real" glue. I was very excited that she couldn't squeeze very well so there wasn't a big mess.

We, finally, used our foam blocks from the Target dollar spot. We sorted them by color. Mostly she just wanted to dump a bunch into any bag and then dump them all over the floor.

The lunch bags aren't very sturdy to use with an ornery tot so I bought some brown paper gift bags to use instead. I've just got to get around to switching the tags.

We also practiced shape/color matching with our Giant Nuts and Bolts. She's still not great at screwing them together but she does match them up.

She also went bowling for the first time. She loved it.

I gave her a tray with colored crafts sticks, matching pom poms, and tongs. She was supposed to match the pom poms to the sticks but she was not even going to attempt that. She did work with the tongs a bit but had a hard time because she insisted on laying on her stomach. That's her new thing and it makes it hard for her to do most activities.

Somebody's getting a little table on payday. Hopefully that will end that battle. She gets frusterated that she can't do something she's done before but she refuses to sit up. LOL

Kayleigh chose to practice her shapes with her Hide'N Squeak Eggs. For the first time she actually decided to put them together correctly and in their correct spots. LOL Good thing because we're playing with them again when we get to the letter E.

I finally got around to making a button snake for her. I found that over at The Activity Mom's blog.

She likes to wear it. LOLMackenzie had a nature scavenger hunt as part of her science lesson this week so Kayleigh played Neighborhood Bingo courtesy of 2 Teaching Mommas.

Our letter this week was C. At our house C was for caterpillar and creation.

We did some caterpillar sorting and counting with our games from COAH.

She picked a random number. I asked her what is was. She said, "2" because that is the only important number in her world. Then I'd correct her and I'd count out the proper number of caterpillars with her. Then she'd place them on the mat. Or throw them. Whatever.

She's gotten really good at this. She played it all week long.We read about the story of Creation in our many tot Bibles. Then we started making a Creation book. I was hoping to get more than one page done but that didn't happen. So we'll just keep going until we finish.

I forgot to post her C page for her book. C is for caterpillar and she just put dot stickers on the C and added eyes and anntena.